The Stanley Cup as scripted by David Chase of "The Sopranos"

The end of the Stanley Cup finals was one of the weirdest things I've seen in 40 years of watching sports. You have these butterflies -- overtime in Game 6 will do that -- and then there's a routine looking shot by the Blackhawks' Patrick Kane and then... No red light, no memorable call by NBC's Doc Emrick, no eruption from the Chicago players but instead a celebration that snowballs slowly over the eternity that it took the world to realize the puck was hiding in plain net. The worst was just the stunned silence of 20,000 people at the Wachovia Center, who stood there like maybe they'd all just watched a fatal car crash, but were still praying that somehow the driver of the crushed car would somehow be alright.

I had the weird sense that this bizarre moment was something I'd seen before, but I couldn't place it. Until this morning, when there was a brief mention on TV that this was the third anniversary of the end of "The Sopranos." That was it! The players were all skating around like normal, and every was a tad anxious that something big was about to happen...and suddenly one of the greatest NHL seasons just faded to black, and the audience stood there scratching their heads, refusing to accept that it ended like that, thinking that maybe just something had malfunctioned. Was that Patrick Kane in the Members Only jacket?

And the strangest thing was that every Flyers fan was hearing that same song coming from Tony Sporano's jukebox.